New family of COVID sub-variants detected in Australia

COVID cases are on the rise across Australia, following the arrival of a new family of highly transmissible sub-variants known as 'flirt'.

Transcript

00:00 This is a highly transmissible family of sub variants. Now this originates from the Omicron

00:09 variant. Luckily what we are seeing is that this generally causes a much less severe disease

00:15 than say some of those earlier different versions that we saw in 2020 and 2021. However, in

00:21 the United States, what's actually happened there is that this family, this flirt family,

00:26 has basically overtaken all other forms of this virus that causes COVID. And now all

00:32 cases of COVID there are basically connected to this flirt variant. So we're expecting

00:38 to see very similar things here. So more cases of COVID are expected because it is easily

00:44 transmissible. Our bodies are not basically able to fight it off as easily as previous

00:51 versions have been. But the good news is that it does cause a lot less severe disease. So

00:56 while we are expecting a huge rise in cases at a time when we're seeing respiratory illnesses

01:02 in general also spike across Australia, it is expected that we will have fewer severe

01:07 cases of COVID in the future.

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